Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  There was a desperate look in his doggy eyes: he needed a chocolate drop, a pat on the head, a rubber bone to chew on, a stamp of approval for the churning cauldron of petty emotions that functioned as his intellect.

  I remembered Mrs Mann’s expression when she’d come to collect Giselle after the operation; the delicate little jaw set firm, the victorious smile nudging at her mouth as she wrote the cheque. I told her about the foetuses.

  ‘Not such virgin territory after all, you see,’ I’d said. ‘Your Giselle here isn’t as innocent as she looks.’

  Mrs Mann adjusted her face.

  ‘Well, I came to you in the nick of time, then,’ she said finally, with a brisk smile. It struck me, her decisiveness, the cool way she took it. (The way the mastiff man had behaved over the cysts this morning, it was like his own bollock I was planning to cut open.)

  ‘She’s too young to be a mother,’ she’d added brightly. I’d heard that one before. It was a fairly standard remark, uttered by women who bought themselves a baby-substitute, then got jealous when little Miss Primate became a teenager and got knocked up. ‘Giselle couldn’t possibly cope,’ she said. ‘She comes from a very sensitive pedigree, you know.’

  I remember snorting, and exchanging a glance with Holly. Someone out there – probably the same bloke who designed the elasticated trainers – was whacking up a fortune with this pedigree scam. But there was no point telling Mrs Mann that the monkey family-tree business was a load of shite; she had that appalling look of conviction on her face that people have when they’ve been nourished from birth on pure gibberish.

  Mr Mann was still looking at me expectantly. So was Giselle.

  ‘Well? Will you do it?’

  I didn’t reply. I pretended I hadn’t heard.

  ‘I’ll pay you an extra five hundred Euros.’

  Holly looked at me.

  ‘Cash,’ he said, interpreting my lack of response correctly. There was no shame in his voice, and no shame in mine when I answered.

  ‘A thousand, and I’ll do it.’ It seemed a risk worth taking. ‘But mind you find that licence and destroy it as soon as you get home. I won’t be answerable.’

  I shook the clammy hand he offered me, and he gave me the Euros then and there. Giselle watched as he counted it out; she mimicked his hand movements, and moved her lips like he did, as though she were counting it, too.

  It was all there.

  ‘Right, Giselle, I’d like you to roll up your sleeve now for me, will you, darling?’ I murmured. She complied obediently.

  Mann turned his face away while I found the vein on her hairy little arm. It was his right, I suppose. After all, he’d just paid me a thousand yo-yos not to do the honours himself. Holly turned away, too.

  Giselle didn’t. She watched closely, interested in the procedure.

  ‘See?’ I said, squeezing the syringe. ‘It doesn’t hurt. Night-night, then, baby.’

  She nodded, as though she understood the transaction. She even flashed me a toothy smile. Then went out like a light, the little pink frock crumpling beneath her as she sagged, then horizontalised. Her tail twitched briefly, then hung limp.

  Mann made a choking noise.

  ‘Too late for regrets, mate,’ I told him. His face had faded to a chalky white. He mumbled something I couldn’t make out, then stumbled out of the surgery faster than you could say verbal contract.

  Afterwards, Holly bagged up the stiffening but still-warm Giselle, and said she was handing in her notice.

  ‘What you did was wrong,’ she snivelled, ‘destroying that lovely little girl, and the guy wasn’t even the legal owner. What’ll you do when she comes in? The wife?’

  I was annoyed. Holly didn’t normally question me. But she was new, I had to keep reminding myself.

  ‘Look, she wasn’t a girl,’ I said, nudging at the body-bag. ‘She was a sodding macaque monkey.’

  This stuff was old, old hat to me. I explained to Holly how, having been in the veterinary business now for ten years, five of them since the Fertility Crisis and the quadrupling of domestic animal ownership that it had engendered, I was used to the charade-playing of pet-keepers.

  ‘The psychology of pet-ownership has undergone a sea-change, since the Fertility Crisis,’ I told her, quoting verbatim from an editorial I’d skimmed in Pets Today. Holly nodded impatiently; she’d clearly read the same article. ‘Certain animals have almost literally become children to certain people. Especially the primates.’

  Anyone could have told you that.

  ‘Mr Mann was defending his nephew-substitute against his stepdaughter-substitute,’ I analysed for her. ‘He’s following his own human instinct to protect the nearest he’s got to his own genes. His sister’s offspring, or offspring substitute, is closer to him, genetically speaking, than his wife’s child-substitute that she bought before they met. It’s all imaginary, so it’s bollocks, but it means a lot to their subconsciouses.’

  ‘OK, Mr Super-Intelligent Psychologist,’ goaded Holly, still upset. ‘But how’s Mrs Mann – or should I say her subconscious – going to react?’

  I outlined the forthcoming scenario to her simply: how in the next few days Mrs Mann would come in on a weekday morning surgery with her husband’s dead sister’s monkey, Ritchie, to exact revenge. How she would instruct me to destroy him, and probably offer me some extra money to forget about the licence. How she’d of course be bitter with me over the Giselle thing, but would have the sense to bite her tongue if she wanted Ritchie to join Giselle up there in Great Bananaland.

  ‘And you’d murder Ritchie, too?’ Holly spat out the histrionic word ‘murder’ with the unaccustomed venom of the recently innocent. ‘You’d really do it?’

  I took her by her plump little shoulders and kissed her very long and very hard, the way my temps always seemed to like it. Holly was a sweet thing. I found the puritanical taste of her toothpaste, combined with her naivety, arousing, and Sigmund stirred in my boxer shorts. It was the end of the day, and the last clients had shuffled out of the waiting-room. I was tempted to have Holly then and there, but she wrenched herself away. Her face was still half-angry, but half-admiring, too. I could see that she was as ready for sex as Sigmund and I were, but Ritchie and Giselle were preying on her mind.

  ‘You’d really do it, wouldn’t you?’ she repeated. Her brain seemed to have stuck in a groove.

  ‘There’s no point in lying,’ I said. A whopper in itself, of course. There’s always a point. ‘Yes, I would.’ But honesty wasn’t going to budge her. So I added, with sudden inspiration, ‘Don’t you see? I’m actually assisting in the mercy killing – the euthanasia – of something much bigger.’

  That got her thinking.

  ‘Like what?’ she asked. She didn’t get it, but she wanted to. ‘Like what, exactly, Bobby?’

  ‘Like a failing marriage, Holly,’ I said. Sigmund was straining at the leash. ‘Like a marriage in the throes of death.’

  She understood then, because she didn’t resist as I undressed her and laid her naked on the operating table. Very slowly, I parted her legs and began to lick between them. I felt the origami folds of her flesh thicken; she didn’t move.

  But I was wrong about Mrs Mann. I was wrong about Holly, too.

  The phone rang in the kitchen at home the next morning. I’d just finished defrosting half a dozen sausages in the microwave, and was opening a tin of sliced mushrooms. I picked up the phone, still clasping the tin by the tin-opener, and holding three eggs in my other hand. Not a good idea, because what the woman said made me drop one of them.

  ‘I’m lodging a formal complaint.’ Splat, on the lino. I sat down heavily on a chair, and nursed the mushroom-tin in my lap.

  ‘Who is this?’ I asked, to buy a bit of time, though of course I knew. I remembered those hard little eyes of hers: what I’d taken for sexual repression was clearly something more dangerous. ‘How did you get my private number?’ I wondered about my pulse-rate. It was probably way up around the
hundred-and-forty mark.

  ‘From your assistant. Holly, isn’t it? Lovely girl. You don’t deserve her.’

  ‘No,’ I said. Holly? I felt my heart squeeze up and bang against my rib-cage, like a fist. ‘I don’t deserve her.’

  ‘What you don’t understand,’ said Mrs Mann, ‘is that Giselle –’

  I knew what was coming. I was a killer. I had murdered her baby-substitute in cold blood.

  ‘Giselle was a person,’ she said. She’d been crying, I realised, and was now struggling to keep her voice level.

  ‘Mrs Mann –’ I began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mrs Mann, I –’ (This could develop into something absurd, I realised. It was also, at the same time, quite serious. So now I’m going to put down my remaining eggs, and my tin of mushrooms, very gently, on the floor, and put into action that phrase women hate. Here goes.) ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ she challenged. Her voice still had that deranged crack in it, a fault-line that could suddenly become a chasm. ‘Explain.’

  ‘Your husband told me –’ I started. But she didn’t play by the rules: she butted in.

  ‘I know what happened. He paid you off. You’re – you’re just a cheap contract killer! A thousand Euros? Is that all a child’s life is worth to you, Mr Sullivan?’

  She used the word ‘child’ without a trace of irony.

  ‘Mrs Mann,’ I said gently, thinking: Those yo-yos are going towards my spanking new Audi Nuance, missis, so don’t knock it! And then I said her name again, even more gently. ‘Mrs Mann. As far as I was concerned, it was a perfectly standard procedure. I put down at least five primates every working day.’

  This was a wild exaggeration, I’ll admit. It was one a month, max. As I spoke, I was beginning to wonder if I could tell her that Giselle had been terminally ill. That when I’d inspected her, I’d found inoperable bowel disorder, of the kind monkeys are prone to when they’ve been fed the wrong diet. That Holly, being a temp, had misunderstood. It might get me off the hook. She might even be grateful. But too late: Mrs Mann’s crazed voice was veering up at me again.

  ‘I’m going to fight you all the way,’ she said.

  Some instinct made me glance over at the doormat in the hallway. I peered at the single white rectangle that lay on it. The envelope was addressed to me in Holly’s schoolgirly handwriting. That did it. I’d been caught in a pincer movement.

  ‘Bugger off,’ I told the Mann woman, and slammed down the phone.

  Holly’s letter was hand-delivered and brief. She was leaving ‘for ethical reasons’, and ‘would not hesitate’ to give evidence against me in an inquiry.

  It was that phrase, ‘would not hesitate’ that pissed me off the most.

  I lit the gas-ring and cleaned up the mess. As I stabbed away at the sausages sizzling gently in the frying pan, I thought about Giselle, and the excruciating Manns, and the silly Holly, and the statement that she would make on Mrs Mann’s complaint form. It was generally true, I realised, that, apart from the fleeting exoticism of a sick tarantula or a truly challenging road-accident case like the paralysed collie whose hind legs I’d replaced with little wheels the previous year, my life had become a banal treadmill of feline vaccinations, mauled rabbits, cracked terrapin shells and primate psychiatry. But the Giselle incident was excitement of a kind I didn’t need.

  And then, watching the little flecks of sausage-fat hitting the tiling behind the hob, where they congealed opaquely, a sudden, simple and quite mind-blowingly compelling thought came to me. Primates were a metropolitan thing, largely.

  So quit the jungle.

  Leave them all behind. Holly, and the Manns, and the apes and the monkeys. I could let the surgery to some starry-eyed newcomer, and be gone within the week. A change of scene. Some outdoor stuff. Cows, sheep, geese; the kind of animals that paid their keep, and were brutish, messy and unappealing enough to keep human sentimentality at bay. A place with farms, by the sea. Slurry lagoons. The seaside. Burying Dad in sand and fag-ends. Pissing into the waves. The smell of popcorn. Sex on the beach. Crabs.

  I felt light-hearted and light-headed. As I turned the sausages in the frying pan, I noticed that I had begun to whistle a tune: ‘It’s Now or Never’. Telling, that. And I hadn’t whistled in weeks. Elation was whirling through me like a snort of ether. Then I prodded at the sausages. Yum, yum! My mouth waters just thinking about them. They were prime pork, flecked with dark-green spots of sage. I inhaled, and my heart soared. They smelt of freedom.

  Boundless hope, and the bright motorway up ahead. As my car whooshed northwards to Thunder Spit, I was filled to giddiness with the knowledge that the future was mine.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN WHICH A MISTAKEN PIGLET HOVERS NEAR DEATH

  They sed it wuz not POSSIBEL, the Frozen Woman wrote years later, with her splattery peacock quill. But IPROOVD it WUZ, tho I never SETTE OUT to do so, as I hav no lernin of SYENSE, and at that TYME I had not herd of Mister DARWYNNE’S beleefs.

  The onion-skin parchment on which she laboriously penned her garbled testimony (in blood? In mud? In a hideous mixture of the two?) is now cracked and split with age, and the text itself is smeared with Parson Phelps’ snotty tears, which were to flow and flow in the Sanatorium, before dissolving into the sudden, insane laughter of pure joy.

  All I REKOGNYZED, she wrote, wuz that I had ikkstreemlie BAD LUK in LUVVE.

  She could say that again.

  It is perhaps necessary to state, at a time when fiction is rife, that the account of my life that I deliver here is punctiliously reported, and scrupulously faithful to both truth and fact. That stated, shall I begin?

  Picture first Thunder Spit: a peninsula in the shape of a herring, its tail nailed to the mainland, head straining out to sea. A God-fearing, wave-slapped place, an outcrop of harsh winds and cowering, gnarled trees and shrubs that hug the land like devilish suckers. Follow the promontory: follow the line of the herring’s back and find the dorsal fin, a beach of grey bleached sand and grey bleached rock. Look back across the fish’s belly, past the flat shimmer of the River Flid, and see the grey slate roofs of the town like a mesh of scales. Further west, see the Church of St Nicholas, a spike its skull. The smell of salt, and thyme, and rock, and seaweed, and rotting fish. Sea-water washing and sloshing at you from north and south. There are floods each year, when the tide spills too far.

  Thunder Spit; this was home, the home I still wear inside me like an extra ventricle, pounding away: Thunder Spit; a village famed for its annual bare-handed Thistle-Pulling Contest, for which a special field is set aside; a village where men have always been raised to seek out discomfort, and to thrive on it, striving to maintain the rigorous hair-shirt mentality of their forefathers. My foster-father, a moon-faced, passionate man who encouraged this approach to hardship, always used to say, ‘Coddle yourself, Tobias, and you slip away from God.’ On Fridays, he would stuff marbles into his shoes: he believed in paying penance whether you owed it or not. But my foster-mother, who suffered from bunions, and who would have liked to coddle herself and slip away from God once in a while, perhaps into a little brushed cotton, made a rigid horizontal of her lips and said nothing. That was her way.

  Thunder Spit, home of the herring gull, the kittiwake, the storm petrel, the guillemot, the Lord Chief Justice sheep, the Hildamore cow, the famous Thunder Spit tortoiseshell cat, a variety of dogs, and three hundred and twenty-three of God’s human citizens.

  Soon to be three hundred and twenty-four.

  This is how the story goes: I heard it often enough. The white light, the piglet, the doctor, the infection, the gift-from-Heaven nonsense. The story changes, with the appearance of the umbilical cord, but that’s for later. The happy part first: my famous arrival in the Year of Our Lord 1845, as recounted by the God-fearing gent who was to become my father, for better and for worse, and despite himself.

  Parson Phelps was well aware – sometimes most painfully so – that miracles did not o
ften come to Northumberland, much less to Thunder Spit. Quasi-occult dabblings involving tea-leaves and chicken-droppings, accusations of witchcraft against Mrs Boggs’ idiot cousin Joan, moral transgressions of the adulterous variety, calves with two heads, yes. But miracles, never, if he was honest with himself. (And when was he not?) The biggest excitement for months had been the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight, which rolled out of Judlow yesterday, leaving the usual hot and silly mess of yearning in its wake. Parson Phelps had preached against it, as he did every year, and all the more fervently when he had heard that this year’s exhibits included a Man-Eating Wart-hog, a Ten-Foot Woman, and a Latvian hermaphrodite with a fan of ostrich plumes poking out of its exposed anus. The Fair, with its spangle-maned horses and Mechanical Millipede and dizzying bravura, always left the villagers goggle-eyed and addle-brained. Last year, a Judlow lad, drunk on exotic decadence, had sailed away on a Chinese skiff, and was now living among the heathens of Xiang, doing fancy basketwork and tat chi. The Fair always gave rise to a desire among the young to cast off their scratchy hessian, to popinjay themselves in silk and taffeta, to escape and see the world. Even though, as the Parson repeatedly told them, bellowing from his honest and unadorned wooden pulpit until he grew hoarse, all of God’s kingdom was before them, here beneath the vast flat open sky which is God’s window, and the salt ocean which is the residue of his tears, water which is both cruel and angry and beautiful and full of the triumphant sardine, the Lord’s own fish. Search no further than your own doorstep to find magic! It is already here, all about us, in God’s creation!

  Slosh, slosh, went the grey North Sea as the Parson hell-fired and brimstoned his message to the fisherfolk.

  Oh yes? thought the young men, their hands sore from thistle-pulling and scraping out lobster pots. Is that a fact? mused the young women, wiping their bloodied hands on rough aprons after a hard morning’s work, gutting fish and singing, cracked and tuneless, the rhythmic ballads of drudgery that were passed down from mother to daughter in these parts: ‘Hey-a-Minnie,’ ‘Bobby Shafto’, ‘The Crab’s Lament’. Their lives were hard and thankless. No wonder they craved fairgrounds. Who in their right mind would say no to a toffee apple?